Archive/File: people/i/irving.david/libel.suit/transcripts/day002.09
Last-Modified: 2000/07/20
A. I will say generally, of course, and it is important for
the case to know, and I am saying this on oath, I have
never knowingly or wilfully misrepresented a document or
. P-174
misquoted it, or suppressed parts of the document
which
would run counter to my case, I think it is important
to
state that. Any of the other allegations in that
line,
misquoting, misconstruing, mistranslating, distorting
or
manipulating a document I have not done. I shall be
very
surprised indeed if the defence manage to make out a
watertight case on even one document in that line.
I think I would hang up my hat if that could be
established against me. It would be a despicable
thing
for a historian to do, but it would be also very
difficult, because in my case I have always
instantaneously made my documents available to my
opponents. Sometimes in advance of publication of my
own
book I would turn over documents like the Bruns Report
to
Professor Fleming. When I found the article Aumeier
Report in the British archives I actually contacted
Professor Richard van Pelt, whose book on Auschwitz
I greatly admired and I said you will certainly find
this
document of great interest and I told him exactly
where
the file was to be found. I have always been like
that.
It would be very difficult simultaneously do that, my
Lord, and at the same time distort the document
because
you are going to get found out and shot. So I did not
do
it. But that is the only general remark I would make
and
possibly of importance because it is a statement on
oath.
Q. I think that is right. The next topic that is
addressed
. P-175
by the Defendants is the bombing of Dresden in 1945?
A. Again, I will make a general statement on it, my Lord.
This was the -- it was not actually the first book
I wrote. The first book I wrote was a history of the
bombing war, but it was only published in German -- in
Switzerland. It was written at the same time as I
wrote
the book "The Destruction of Dresden", which was a
three
year task, between 1961 and 1963.
I emphasise the years, because in 1961 and
1963,
of course, we were not in the happy position that we
are
in now where we can go to the public archives and see
the
documents. I understand that I can go down the road
to
the public archives and actually see correspondence
that
I had with Harold Wilson, this kind of thing.
I personally frown on it. I liked the old 50 year
rule
because there were ways round it. But in those years
there
was a 50 year rule in operation. In you wanted to
write a
history of something that happened in World War II you
could not get the original documents if you were not
an
official historian.
Q. That is from the British --
A. From the British point of view.
Q. -- what about the German records, were they available?
A. The German records were in a more difficult position
because Dresden lay in the Soviet zone of Germany, the
German Democratic Republic as it had by that time
become
. P-176
and although I had established cordial relations with
City
Archives Director in Dresden, Dr Walter Lange, they
were
under no kind of obligation or compulsion to make
their
records available to me and they did so on a very
piecemeal basis, what the Germans would call in salami
slices, piece by piece they would give me a document,
according to how they thought they could fit it into
the
Cold War propaganda. I had to weigh it from that
point of
view.
I emphasise this because three years later
after
the book was published those same officials in East
Germany decided they had now just found a report on
the
statistics on the air raid on Dresden which produced
figures which were different from mine.
Q. You are making this point really to explain why your
estimate of the number of deaths, which is really what
the
Dresden issue is about?
A. Yes.
Q. Has fallen fairly dramatically from a quarter of a
million --
A. I would not say "fallen", that implies only way, I
would
say "fluctuate".
Q. -- in a downwards direction, would you accept that?
A. If you were a scientist you would not say "the figure
is
this", you would say it is probably that, with a upper
margin of this and a lower margin of that. You would
give
. P-177
a range of probabilities, and the range of
probabilities
I have given has remained roughly the same, but I have
brought down the target figure. The original figure
I gave, I hasten to add, was not my figure, it was the
figure given to me by a man who met the Trevor Roper
criteria. If you remember, my Lord, somebody who is
in a
position to know.
This was a man who was school teacher in
Hanover
who had nothing to gain from it, who had asked no
money
for it, but after the air raid on Dresden, which took
place on February 13th 1945, this school teacher had
the
unfortunate task of running the missing persons bureau
in
Dresden, the Dead Person Section, he had been given
the
job of setting a card index in this appalling task of
trying to identify the dead. They did it, for
example,
they collected buckets of wedding rings from the
corpses.
I am sure the defence will appreciate when I talk
about
buckets of wedding rings, gold wedding rings, were
collected from the corpses of the air raid victims
because
inside a German wedding ring there is the initials and
the
date of the wedding, so they could identify the corpse
from that. Or they could have an index card just
saying
"KD" and a date on the inside of wedding ring. They
built
up this card index.
Of course, this was incomplete because they
had
not got all the corpses and not all the corpses were
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adults, not all the adults were married. But he was
able
to extrapolate and he kept a diary, which he also made
available to me. When I asked him the 60,000 dollar
question, I said, Dr Voigt or Mr Voigt, how many
people in
your estimate died in that air raid on Dresden? He
gave
me an upper estimate and a lower estimate, and he then
said that in his own belief the figure was probably
135,000. Which was the figure I then used, and I
quoted
the source as being this man. In other words it was
not a
figure on my authority, it was a figure on the
authority
of the source. I see no reason really to depart from
that
figure because, it may sound self-defeating, I say
that
there is not much difference between 135,000 dead and
35,000 dead. Both of them are a monstrous tragedy or
crime, depending on which end of scale you are viewing
it
from. If you are one of those dead it hurts just as
much
if you are one of the 35,000 or one of 135,000. So
I confess that I did not dedicate as much work to try
to
pin down the actual death roll as no doubt the defence
would have liked me to have done, the Defendants in
this
case, my Lord.
But I would also submit this cannot be
categorized as being wilful misrepresentation, or
distortion. My Lord, you will remember that I said
that
the German police chief's document giving a different
death figure had been found three years after I wrote
the
. P-179
book. It was supplied to me by the East German
authorities, very kindly, voluntarily, and by an
extraordinary coincidence in exactly the same post
I received from the West German Government a summary
of
the German Finance Ministry files for that week which
contained precisely the same figures that that East
German
document contained, because otherwise one which might
have
suspected this was an East German cold war propaganda
trick. So it was a very authentic kind of document.
But
even then you had to say the document was dated,
I believe, March 10th 1945, less than four weeks after
the
air raid on Dresden.
My Lord, I do not know if you have seen the
photographs of Dresden after the air raid. There was
not
very much left standing. The building -- the city was
pancaked. Nobody had excavated the city centre. The
people who were living in the old town were still
buried
in the basements where they had been suffocated or
crushed
alive. So the figure that the Police Chief gave in
his
report of March 4th 1945 could still only be regarded
as
provisional.
Q. What is the figure in the current edition of
"Destruction
of Dresden"?
A. Can I just complete what I was about to say, I was
just
pausing for dramatic effect. The step which I then
took,
having received this document, was as follows:
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I discussed it with my publisher, and I said that it
was
an important enough document that I had to draw it to
the
attention of the reading public immediately, and he --
Mr Kimber -- and Mr Kimber, God rest his soul, he
said:
David do not do that. If you do, it will come down on
your head. It will reflect on you in a bad way, and I
said
this is an important document, and I have a duty to
bring
it to the attention of reading public, and I sent it
as a
letter to The Times, which is in the discovery, and
The
Times newspaper published it, I believe, on July 6th
1966,
within a very true days of my actually receiving the
document from the East Germans, the new figures, the
fact
that there was a considerably lower death roll
estimated
by the local Police Chief. I added my reservations,
the
fact that the city was still largely unexcavated, even
then, in 1966 and the fact that local Police Chief was
in
charge of air raid civil defence measures. So he had
no
reason to give a bigger figure. He would prefer to
give a
lower figure.
Q. This is Mr Grosse?
A. I cannot remember exactly which name it was, the man
who
wrote the final report. Grosse wrote the incorrect
report, the propaganda report, my Lord. I emphasise
the
fact that I made this immediately known to the reading
public and not only that but at my own expense I had a
reprint made of that letter by The Times newspaper. I
had
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500 copies printed and for the next few years I
enclosed
that letter with all my correspondence to other
historians.
Now I do not know any other historian who
would
have taken action like that, my Lord. He would hoped
nobody found out, possibly. He certainly would not
have
gone out of the way to draw the attention of other
people
to an error or possible error that he had made in one
of
his own books. To find myself now, 30 years later,
defending myself against the allegation of
manipulation
and distortion beggers description, it is repugnant,
my
Lord.
Q. What is the figure in the current edition of
"Destruction
of Dresden" for the number of deaths?
A. I have reduced my best estimate to the region of
60,000.
This is the edition which is called "Apocalypse 1945"
the
destruction of Dresden because it was not until three
years ago that I sat down and analysed that Police
Chief's
report and compared it with the Grosse Report and saw
the
obvious similarities and the obvious discrepancies and
decided that the Grosse Report had been deliberately
issued by the Propaganda Ministry for propaganda
purposes. But 60,000, my Lord, 35,000, 135,000, you
may
disagree with me, but I see no difference between
these
figures, any more than somebody whose says it was not
6
million who died in the Holocaust, it was only one
million
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which is the kind of sentence I would never utter because
each one of those people being killed is a crime and
I consider people being killed in saturation bombing air
raids, although I am British, I think it is wrong.

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